Introducing the Living Document

By Nate Botwick, Edmond Lau

A living document is alive. It communicates with you and your team. It stays up-to-date. A living document tells you when your colleague updates the sales figures; it buzzes your phone when a task is assigned to you; it’s constantly bubbling with your team’s feedback; it’s always updated with the data you need. Living documents are not file attachments: they speed up your workflow and enable you to work less dumb. That’s the power of Quip.

Quip is a unique marriage of content and communication in a single, simple experience. Collaboration happens in many ways within a team, but when our customers create a Quip, real work gets done, faster, smarter.

Today’s announcement: A design for your living documents

Today, we’re releasing a new design for Quip built around the workflow of living documents. Quip now has a powerful new inbox where you can follow the updates of all the documents you’re working on. We also redesigned our approach to folders, making things easier to organize. Your team’s documents now have a clear “home” and are always easy to find.

With Quip’s new design, your documents keep you up-to-date instead of you keeping up with them.

A smart and useful new inbox for documents

Don’t let the name fool you— this isn't your granddad’s email inbox. Quip’s new inbox intelligently updates you when your team makes changes to your shared documents, making it easier to see what your team is doing and to stay on top of the changes you care about. Think of the inbox as a smart feed of the activity that matters to you.

The new inbox is designed to be the core of your team’s workflow. It includes a bunch of powerful new features to make it work well even for the most active teams, including filters and starring. All of these changes translate to more signal and less noise, and that means more time for you to get sh*t done.

A new approach to folders

The problem with most web-based documents is that they exist only as hyperlinks buried deep in email threads in your inbox. It’s no wonder most offices still rely on email for everything.

Quip’s living documents are different. They’re long-lived and constantly being updated — they’re the hub for projects and the home for teams. In fact, at Instacart, one of our earliest customers, over 60% of the documents they created a year ago are still being actively worked on by their team, week after week.

With Quip’s new design, shared folders have been made much more prominent, so that your team’s documents always have a clear “home.” That makes your documents easier to find, and easier to get back to. You can now also navigate the product via a new, central “All Documents” view, which lets you see every document and folder that you have access to. All of these features combine to make Quip great not just for managing your shared documents, but also for managing the shared organization that our teams love and depend on.